About

Kimberly Nichele Brown, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies (GSWS) at Virginia Commonwealth University where she formally served as chair of GSWS as well as the Department of African American Studies. Before coming to VCU, professor Brown taught for fourteen years in the Department of English at Texas A&M University where she also co-founded and directed the Africana Studies Program. Her areas of specialization include contemporary African American women’s literature and culture, black feminist theory, Africana film, Afrofuturism and 20th century American and Africana literatures. Professor Brown is the author of "Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women’s Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text" published by Indiana University Press in 2010. Professor Brown is currently working on two book-length manuscripts, "IncogNegro Stances: Cross-racial Espionage in Contemporary Literature and Film" (under contract with University of Mississippi Press) and "Through Ebony Eyes: A Black Feminist and Ethical Praxis of Viewing Contemporary Film." In "IncogNegro Stances" professor Brown presents an alternate form of cross-racial identification and racial passing based on resistance and subversion that she calls “cross-racial espionage.” She investigates themes of boarder-crossing, hybridity, liminality and racial passing as political strategies utilized by filmmakers and writers from World War II to the present who take deliberate stances against anti-blackness and white supremacy. In the tentatively titled, "Through Ebony Eyes," professor Brown models anti-racist and ethical film analysis through a reading of contemporary films from the late-twentieth-century to the present. Her work on contemporary representations of blackness in film has appeared in anthologies such as African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness, Hollywood’s Africa after 1994 and Slavery in the Post-Black Imagination.